Because he uses theatrical techniques that have been identified with postmodern theatre, Sam Shepard is often written of as a postmodern playwright.1 Certainly his theatrical techniques have much in common with those of the postmodern theatre. His stage reality is layered and fragmented, his characters sometimes intersubjective and transformational. He juxtaposes borrowings from and allusions to popular culture with those of history and high culture in an often free-form, playful way. He often uses sets that call attention to the theatre’s existence as theatre, and invites acting techniques that call attention to the actor as performer and the play as performance. All of this Shepard shares with his postmodern contemporaries. His conception of the playwright’s art, however, is far from the distant, ironic stance of the postmodern artist. In fact, as Michael Early has pointed out, Shepard has a great affinity with the American Romanticism of nineteenth-century Transcendentalists like Emerson and Whitman. Unlike theirs, however, Shepard’s is a dark Romanticism, closer to the Gothic imagination of Poe or the cosmic despair of Melville than to the Transcendental optimism of Emerson or Whitman. What he chiefly has in common with the Romantics is his sense of the artistic imagination, his awe for his own gift and his compulsion to understand it.
Shepard began his career writing plays that featured what he has called “arias,” long speeches with startlingly original imagery that went on for two or three pages. Like nineteenth-century Romantics such as Coleridge and Poe, he wrote from an often drug-induced inspiration. In a 1997 interview, he told the Paris Review: “I felt kind of like a weird stenographer. I don’t mean to make it sound like hallucination, but there were definitely things there, and I was just putting them down. I was fascinated by how they structured themselves, and it seemed like the natural place to do it was on a stage.”2 Shepard’s conception of artistic creation has a great deal in common with Coleridge’s seminal description of the artist’s imagination, as a “secondary” reflection of the “primary imagination” that is “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception . . . a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”3 In Coleridge’s system, the artist must combine the power of the imagination with the conscious will of the craftsman to create art. A similar division between unfathomable imagination or inspiration and conscious, rational craft and control can be seen in many Romantic and post-Romantic formulations of the artistic process, such as Nietzsche’s division between the Dionysian and the Apollonian creative forces. In his early years, Shepard eschewed revision, as though unwilling to tamper with the unalloyed products of the imagination, but as he has matured, and left mind-altering substances behind, the many drafts of plays like Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind attest to his bringing the craftsman in him to operate extensively on the pure products of the imagination.
That the imagination and the act of writing have continued to preoccupy Shepard is evident from the appearance of the artist as character in so many of his plays from the seventies and eighties. Along with the plays that depict the artist as musician, such as The Mad Dog Blues (1971) and The Tooth of Crime (1972), is a group of plays that address the subject of the writer, and more particularly the writer’s relationship to the overwhelming power of the imagination in the writing process. While there are allusions to the subject in many of Shepard’s plays, the most substantial treatment of this subject occurs in Geography of a Horse Dreamer (1974), Angel City (1976), True West (1980), and Fool for Love (1983).
Horse Dreamer and Angel City are directly related to Shepard’s experience when, as a young Off-Off-Broadway playwright of 24, he was chosen by Michelangelo Antonioni to write the screenplay for his film about the new generation of American youth, Zabriskie Point (1970). Shepard worked with Antonioni for two months in Europe, and then returned with him to Los Angeles, but he did not stay with the film, which has three other screenwriting credits besides Shepard’s and Antonioni’s, to its completion. Shepard has said that his leaving the project was simply a matter of not being able to do the kind of writing Antonioni wanted at that point: “He wanted political repartee and I just didn’t know how.”4 Although Shepard left Zabriskie Point, he did not immediately leave the film industry. As he described his experience to the Village Voice in 1975: “As soon as you start writing a movie you get these scripts showing up in the mail . . . Twenty thousand for this one and 30 thousand for that one. It’s like an open auction – suddenly you’re in the screenwriters’ market. I find it exhausting, not only exhausting – debilitating.”5 Working in several capacities as a writer and script doctor, Shepard was appalled by the position of the screenwriter in the movie industry. “Here’s a guy who’s an artist in the traditional sense, and then all the accouterments – the life – everything that surrounds him just brings the whole thing down.”6 In 1980 he said that “screenwriting’s been amputated by a bunch of corporate businessmen figuring they’re artists . . . it’s too bad, too. That’s a legit form, screenwriting.”7
Shepard’s early experience with the movie industry was disillusioning and deeply disturbing. After the heady experience of being able to have his plays produced Off-Off Broadway, almost at his will, uncut and with the playwright as final arbiter on aesthetic decisions, it was shocking to encounter art as business, with the writer simply one of the instruments by which a salable product, the movie, was to be produced. In 1975 he said he hated working on films: “Because it’s never just that. It’s never just working on a film. It has to do with studios, with pleasing certain people, cutting things down, and rewriting. It’s not a writer’s medium – the writer is just superfluous . . . to submerge yourself in that world of limousines and hotels and rehashing and pleasing Carlo Ponti is just . . . forget it.”8 It was immediately following his experience with Hollywood, in 1971, that Shepard moved his family to London for three years and began writing deeply introspective plays about the artistic process and the position of the artist in contemporary society. Being Sam Shepard, he did not address these issues head on, but they emerged from deep inside the creative ferment of his imagination.
Crucial to the plays about writing is the concept of character that Shepard was developing in the seventies and eighties. Because his characters are not “integrated subjects” – because they fragment and transform during the play – Shepard’s conception of character is often considered to be postmodern – that his characters have no essential self but are sites of continually shifting subjectivity.9 Shepard’s view of character belies this notion, however, as when he says: “I think character is something that can’t be helped, it’s like destiny. It’s something that’s essential . . . I think character is an essential tendency that can’t be – it can be covered up, it can be messed with, it can be screwed around with, but it can’t be ultimately changed. It’s like the structure of our bones, the blood that runs through our veins.”10 This description, with its concept of character as an immutable essence, is much closer to Aristotle’s than to the shifting, unstable subjectivity or intersubjectivity of the postmodern conception. What lends Shepard’s characters to postmodern analysis is his ability to make use of postmodern techniques in dramatizing his characters. Perhaps his clearest formulation of what he is after is in his “Note to the Actors” in Angel City, where he speaks of character as “a fractured whole with bits and pieces of character flying off the central theme. In other words, more in terms of collage construction or jazz improvisation.” The actor should be “mixing many different underlying elements and connecting them through his intuition and senses to make a kind of music or painting in space.” The “abrupt changes” in the characters “can be taken as full-blown manifestations of a passing thought or fantasy, having as much significance or ‘meaning’ as they do in our ordinary lives. The only difference is that here the actor makes note of it and brings it to life in three dimensions.”11 The allusion to jazz improvisation is telling. For Shepard, who is a musician, the notion of character as playing many variations around a single theme comes naturally, and it is crucial to the startling originality of his work. What divides his work in the seventies from that of the postmodernist is that the central theme is there in the character. It has an essence.
In Geography of a Horse Dreamer and Angel City, Shepard’s subject is the artist’s imagination, and the danger of “messing with it” by selling it to a capitalist enterprise, like the movie industry, that simply seeks to commodify the artist by turning him into an instrument for producing a product that will generate profit for its owners. The play’s imaginaire grows out of Shepard’s most immediate experience in the movie industry and in moving his family to England. When Shepard first moved to London, he lived in Shepherd’s Bush, then a working-class neighborhood, where there was a greyhound track. Shepard had had a deep affection for horse-racing since his teenage years, when he worked at the Santa Anita racetrack in California. He formed a similar attachment to greyhound racing in England, even buying and racing his own dog, Keywall Spectre.
Geography of a Horse Dreamer gestures strongly toward Harold Pinter’s absurdist classic, The Dumb Waiter, in which two hit men wait in a room to get their orders for the next job. Horse Dreamer opens in “an old sleazy hotel room. Semirealistic with a beat-up brass bed, cracked mirror, broken-down chairs, small desk, etc.”12 The protagonist Cody (who shares his name with Buffalo Bill), a young man from Wyoming wearing jeans and a cowboy shirt, lies spread-eagled on his back on the bed, his arms and legs handcuffed to the bedposts, asleep with dark glasses on. He is watched over by two forties-style gangsters, Santee and Beaujo. As the situation emerges in the first act, it becomes clear that Cody is a “horse dreamer,” someone with the power to dream the winners of horse-races, and he has been, as he says, “kidnapped,” or “wined and dined” (287), by a sinister organization headed by a character named Fingers, who exploits his dreams to win at the races. The situation in Act 1, “The Slump,” is that Cody, “Mr. Artistic Cowboy,” as Santee calls him, has lost the ability to dream winners, and the team has been demoted from the luxury of the Beverly Wiltshire Hotel to this sleazy dump. Fingers has imprisoned Cody in the room, feeding him barbiturates so he’ll sleep and dream, but Cody says he will never recover his ability to dream horses there: “He don’t understand the area I have to dream in . . . the inside one. The space inside where the dream comes. It’s gotta be created” (283). Cody complains that, by locking him in a room, Fingers has “blocked up my senses. Everything forces itself on the space I need. There’s too much chaos now” (283–84). Tellingly for Shepard at this stage in his career, Cody tries to answer Beaujo’s question, “how did it happen before? It used to be a snap for you.” “I don’t know,” he says, “It was accidental. It just sort of came to me outa’ the blue . . . At first it’s all instinct. Now it’s work” (285). Cody wants to go back to the Great Plains, to Wyoming, where his real horse dreams are inspired, complaining that Fingers has “poisoned my dreams with these cities” (287), but instead Fingers assigns him to “start dreamin’ dogs,” despite Beaujo’s objection that “he can’t suddenly change his whole style a’ dreaming like that. It might kill him” (288). Santee explains that he has no say in the matter: “The pressure’s there. It comes from the outside. Somewhere out there . . . That’s how it is. You got the genius, somebody else got the power. That’s how it always is, Beethoven. The most we can hope for is a little room service and a color TV” (291).
In Act 2, “The Hump,” the team has been moved to a fancy hotel room, and all the characters have new clothes. Cody has acquired an Irish accent and now dreams and talks of nothing but dogs. Beaujo suggests that he has “some kind a’ weird mental disorder. I told ya’ he was a genius. There’s a very fine line between madness and genius ya’ know” (295). Santee is unimpressed, answering, “He’s gone bananas and that’s all there is to it. It just happens to coincide with our needs” (295). As the act goes on, Cody literally turns into a dog, at first dreaming and talking from the dog’s point of view, and then behaving like a dog, leaping around the room and crashing into things, squealing and squirming when Santee catches hold of him. Fingers appears with an ominous figure called “the Doctor” who looks like Sydney Greenstreet. The Doctor prepares to cut the “dreamer’s bone” out of Cody’s neck, in hopes of making use of his power for a while longer. Cody begins to speak of the power of the white buffalo: “This day has sent a spirit gift. You must take it. Clean your heart of evil thoughts. Take him in a sacred way. If one bad thought is creeping in you it will mean your death” (306). As the Doctor cuts into the back of Cody’s neck with a scalpel, Cody’s two brothers, huge cowboys named Jasper and Jason, come through the door with a shotgun blast. After killing the Doctor and Santee, they take Cody back home to Wyoming, telling him, “come on, now. You gather yerself together. A little beef stew in yer gullet, you’ll be good as new” (306).
Ross Wetzsteon has called the play “an extended metaphor for the personal dilemma of the artist himself,” noting that it was written while Shepard was in England, “when, hardly coincidentally to the plot, his new fascination with dog racing paralleled a resurgence of interest in his work by a new audience. (Suddenly, as in the play, he dreamed ‘winners’ again.)” Wetzsteon suggests the play’s import is that “Shepard was clearly ill at ease in England”13 citing Cody’s Irish (“outsider’s”) accent and the fact that Fingers is depicted as an effete Englishman in a bowler hat. This sense of dislocation is certainly there in the play, but it goes deeper than the geographic dislocation from the US to the UK. Shepard is also writing out of the more fundamental dislocation he had recently felt as a writer for the movies, where he and his creative power had been treated as salable commodities. Like Cody, he had been expected to produce “winners” on demand, whether he had any affinity for or knowledge of the subject or not, as with the “political repartee” of Zabriskie Point. And, like Cody, he had been “wined and dined” and removed from the environment that inspired him, placed in what was to him a luxurious and hermetically sealed prison, and expected to be creative. The heart of the play is the artist’s fear of losing his creative power, or more specifically, of having it stolen from him by businessmen who place no value on it except as a profit-making instrument. The danger of violating the artist’s imagination is set out in its most primal terms, which are also major themes of the dark Romantics – the destruction of the artist through madness and death. Through the image of the sacred white buffalo at the end of the play, Shepard conveys the reverential spirit with which the artistic imagination must be approached: “Take him in a sacred way. If one bad thought is creeping in you it will mean your death. You will crumble to the earth. You will vanish from this time” (306).
Martin Tucker writes that Horse Dreamer presents a very dark representation of the suffering of artists in contemporary America, suggesting that perhaps “the only way out for the contemporary artist, once he has entered the world of public attention/performance, is a lobotomy of his dreams.”14 This play certainly is dark, but how dark it is depends on how the imagery of its ending is dramatized on stage, and how the particular spectator reads that imagery. Shepard’s stage directions say that “Cody sits on the bed with the back of his neck bleeding. He doesn’t know where he is” (306), which might suggest that the “dreamer’s bone” has been removed from his neck. But he is being taken back to Wyoming, the original geography of his horse dreaming, and the play ends with the zydeco music that he has called his “source of inspiration” (285). Shepard opens up the suggestion that there is hope for the artist who breaks free of the profit-making machine and goes back to the sources of his creativity.
Angel City has a similar aesthetic to that of Horse Dreamer, and it might be seen as a development and intensification of its theme of the commodification of the artist. Unlike Horse Dreamer, it is a direct treatment of the Hollywood movie industry. As Leonard Wilcox has shown, Angel City is in the tradition of “L.A. noir,” and it alludes powerfully to such classic texts about Los Angeles and the movie industry as Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust and the works of Raymond Chandler. Its situation is that Rabbit Brown, an artist who has been living on the desert, is summoned by two movie producers named Lanx (read Lax) and Wheeler (wheeler-dealer) to come and serve as a script doctor on a failing movie project. They have called Rabbit in because he is “supposed to be an artist, right? . . . a kind of magician or something . . . You dream things up” (67). The parallel with Shepard’s experience is plain here, and, as in Horse Dreamer, he identifies Rabbit as a specifically Western writer who has drawn his inspiration from the land and the old traditions. Rabbit (like Shepard) doesn’t fly, and he has come to L.A. in a buckboard, stopping at all the old Spanish missions along the way to pray. He has “bundles of various sizes attached to him by long leather thongs and dragging on the floor behind him” (64), Indian medicine bundles that are to be laid out on a wheel representing the universe. The West is the “Looks-Within place,” and its bundle is “very dangerous” (97). The East, on the other hand, is “the place of illumination, where we can see things clearly far and wide” (98).
The plan of Lanx and Wheeler is to exploit Rabbit’s “magic” to save their movie. Believing that they can save themselves from “total annihilation” (71) only by injecting a major disaster in the picture, they assign him to come up with “something which will in fact drive people right off the deep end . . . something which not only mirrors their own sense of doom but actually creates the possibility of it right there in front of them . . . we must help them devour themselves or be devoured by them” (71). Rabbit at first demurs, suggesting that this is something “totally out of my ball park . . . I’ve conjured a little bit. I collect a few myths, but this sounds like you need a chemical expert or something” (71). Again, the reflection of Shepard’s experience on Zabriskie Point, which ends with an apocalyptic conflagration, is obvious. Rabbit’s gift is completely inappropriate to the job. Nevertheless, Rabbit succumbs to the temptation. Addressing the audience, he says, “I’m ravenous for power but I have to conceal it” (69). The will-to-power is only one part of Rabbit’s motivation for succumbing to the siren lure of L.A. Another is revealed by Tympani (like Shepard, a drummer), a studio musician whose goal is to discover a rhythm structure that is “guaranteed to produce certain trance states in masses of people” (72). He says the force that drew Rabbit is simple, “money.” And Rabbit confesses, “That’s right. So what?” (88). Lanx makes it clear that Rabbit has lost any special claims for his creative gift by turning it into a commodity: “So don’t go pulling rank on me with that ‘Artist’ crap! You’re no better than any of us” (88). The third part of Rabbit’s motivation is revealed by Miss Scoons, a secretary: “The ambition behind the urge to create is no different from any other ambition. To kill. To win. To get on top” (88). In agreeing to work for Lanx and Wheeler on creating a new level of disaster, Rabbit acknowledges that the values of power, money, and ambition have replaced the purer, more spiritual inspirations for creation that he had experienced on the desert, the Spanish missions, and Indian mythology.
In Act 2, the characters are, as Tympani says, “locked into the narrowest part of our dream machine” (97), and restricted to enacting the central “themes” of their particular essences. Lanx spends the act shadow boxing and Rabbit is preoccupied with his medicine bundles, trying to manipulate their spiritual power for his new ends. Wheeler has turned into a monster with slimy green skin, fangs, and extra-long fingernails that turn into claws as the act proceeds. Rabbit discovers in the course of the act that he has become Wheeler. Wheeler shows him a kind of Ur-movie, an epic battle between a man and a woman that ends with the woman stabbing the man and then embracing him. As Wheeler describes the ending: “They were one being with two opposing parts. Everything was clear to them. At last they were connected. In that split second they gained and lost their entire lives” (108). This myth of gender is rejected by Rabbit, who is now a monstrous reflection of Wheeler. He complains that this was not a disaster, and says, “We’re not interested in hanky-panky love stories, romantically depicting the end of the world” (108), a fair description of Zabriskie Point. Rabbit tells Wheeler he’s finished in the movie business, “dead and gone” (110). Wheeler picks up the medicine bundle that represents the West and self-knowledge, and they stand watching as out of it “a slow, steady stream of green liquid, the color of their faces, oozes from it onto the stage” (111). The play ends with Lanx and Miss Scoons, who have transformed into teenager spectators, arguing about whether they will stay for the next movie or not.
The darkness of this representation of the movie industry certainly rivals that of Day of the Locust. It is telling, however, that the imagery Shepard uses is not the purifying fire of Armageddon with which West ends his novel, but the green slime of disgust, undoubtedly self-disgust. The target of Angel City is not so much Los Angeles or the movie business as it is the writer who sells out, the artist who succumbs to ambition and the desire for power and money, turning his creative imagination into a commodity that is for sale to the highest bidder. As in Horse Dreamer, the danger here is that this violation of the artist’s mysterious creative power will destroy the imagination, and therefore the artist. The disaster for Rabbit is that he achieves his ambition in becoming Wheeler. As Wheeler says: “I’m in the business. I’m in pictures. I plant pictures in people’s heads . . . I spread their disease. I’m that powerful” (109). Rabbit, whose hope as an artist was to use the spiritual “medicine” with which he was in tune to create, has become a spreader of the disease he was fighting, a promoter of fear through fake disaster.
True West is built on much starker aesthetic lines than Horse Dreamer or Angel City, but it is a further development of Shepard’s treatment of the bifurcation of the artist into imagination and craft, and the danger of commodifying the imagination. In a well-known statement about the play, Shepard has laid out its general schema:
I wanted to write a play about double nature, one that wouldn’t be symbolic or metaphorical or any of that stuff. I just wanted to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided. It’s a real thing, double nature. I think we’re split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal. It’s not so cute. Not some little thing we can get over. It’s something we’ve got to live with.15
Early reviewers referred to True West as a Cain-and-Abel or Jekyll-and-Hyde play, and several critics have examined the issue of bifurcation in detail, placing it in a variety of interpretive contexts.16 In the context of Shepard’s earlier plays about the artist’s relation to the movie industry, Lee and Austin emerge as representations of imagination and craft, and the play as the drama of their interrelation in the context of the movie business.
As True West opens, Austin is seated at the table in his mother’s kitchen, trying to concentrate on writing what he later identifies as “research” for a movie “project” he is developing with a producer, Saul Kimmer. Austin refers to his movie as a “period piece,”17 a “simple love story.” Austin inhabits the domestic sphere in the play. He has been entrusted by his mother with watching her house and nurturing her plants, and he is working at his job as a screenwriter to support his family, who live somewhere “up North.” For Austin, screenwriting is clearly a craft. He refers to it at one point as “doing business” (14). Austin’s brother Lee has been living out on the desert, where their father, a penniless alcoholic, has been living since he left the family. Lee has not been “anywhere near” Austin for five years and claims to be a “free agent.” When Austin offers Lee some money, Lee accuses him of trying to buy him off as he has the Old Man, with “Hollywood blood money,” saying “I can git my own money my own way. Big money!” (9). Lee claims to have done “a little art myself once” that was “ahead of its time” (6), but now he lives by his wits. Lee does not sleep.
Viewed as a monodrama that dramatizes the conflicting pulls of the imagination and the craftsman within the writer, the play’s opening scene presents the artist who is functioning completely at the level of craft (Austin) within the movie business. His aim is to produce an outline that Saul Kimmer will like well enough to pay him an advance, which will in turn allow him to turn it into a salable script that appeals to “bankable” stars. He is visited by Lee, the imagination, completely out of the blue after a long absence. While Austin has been domesticated in the mother’s kitchen, under the “female” influence of middle-brow culture, Lee has been roaming the desert, Shepard’s “true West,” the domain of the father and the masculine. In the course of the play, the imagination, in the form of Lee, forces itself upon the writer, drawing him into working on his “true-to-life” “Contemporary Western” (18) instead of the love story. Austin refers to Lee’s story as “two lame-brains chasing each other across Texas” (30), which it is (like Shepard’s movie Paris, Texas). But Lee’s narration suggests the power of the imagination in evoking some primal human feelings:
So they take off after each other straight into an endless black prairie. The sun is just comin’ down and they can feel the night on their backs. What they don’t know is that each one of ’em is afraid, see. Each one separately thinks that he’s the only one that’s afraid. And they keep ridin’ like that straight in to the night. Not knowing. And the one who’s chasin’ doesn’t know where the other one is taking him. And the one who’s being chased doesn’t know where he’s going.
(27)
The power of the imagination is mixed up with the venality of Hollywood when Lee wins an advance for his story from Saul on the golf course, but Saul tries to convince Austin to help Lee write the screenplay because “it has the ring of truth . . . something about the real West . . . Something about the land” (35). Besides, as Saul tells Austin, “nobody’s interested in love these days” (35).
The brothers switch places as Lee tries to write without the aid of Austin, and Austin lies drunk on the floor (the writer’s imagination takes hold of him, driving out the craftsman). Austin says that Saul “thinks we’re the same person . . . he’s lost his mind” (37). Lee at first claims that he can write the whole script on his own, but he is soon begging Austin for help. The imagination may “never sleep,” and may force whole stories into the artist’s consciousness, but it cannot create art without the aid of conscious craftsmanship. Austin taunts Lee with the precarious position of the imagination in the context of the business of Hollywood: “Oh, now you’re having a little doubt huh? What happened? The pressure’s on, boy. This is it. You gotta’ come up with it now. You don’t come up with a winner on your first time out they just cut your head off. They don’t give you a second chance ya’ know” (40).
The relationship of the brothers turns into a symbiotic one as both see the inadequacies of their own positions. Austin wants Lee to teach him to live on the desert because he has come to see that “there is nothin’ down here for me. There never was . . . there’s nothin’ real down here, Lee! Least of all me!” (49). For his part, Lee says that he can’t “save” Austin: “Ya’ think it’s some kinda’ philosophical decision I took or somethin’? I’m livin’ out there ’cause I can’t make it here! And yer bitchin’ to me about all yer success!” (49). When Austin agrees to help Lee write the screenplay in exchange for Lee’s taking him to the desert, some integration of craft and imagination begins to seem possible, and they do manage to work together, despite their drunken, quarrelsome state, and the chaos that now surrounds them in the kitchen, as Austin takes Lee’s dictation and agrees to his dictum, “You hear a stupid line you change it. That’s yer job” (51), and Lee sees the imaginative implications of Austin’s line, “I’m on intimate terms with this prairie”: “sounds real mysterious and kinda’ threatening at the same time” (52).
This short-lived integration falls apart when Mom appears, however, with her desire for order, her contention that high culture, in the person of Picasso, lives, and her contempt for the Old Man and the boys, who, she says, will a “probably wind up on the same desert sooner or later” (53). Mom has to leave the house despite Austin’s plea that “this is where you live,” because she doesn’t “recognize it at all” (59). Lee’s visitation to the domestic sphere that Austin had previously inhabited ruptures Austin’s relationship to the culture that Shepard identifies with the female. Before she leaves, Mom tells Austin that he cannot kill Lee because “it’s a savage thing to do,” and he responds, “yeah well don’t tell me I can’t kill him because I can” (58). The status of the imagination remains in doubt as the brothers stand facing each other at the end of the play, but their interaction has wreaked havoc on the realistic set, a visual representation of the impossibility of containing the writer’s imagination within its limits and conventions. This is, of course, a metatheatrical reference to True West itself, which begins on a set that, Shepard notes, “should be constructed realistically with no attempt to distort its dimensions, shapes, objects, or colors” (3), and ends with the two brothers facing each other in the night: “a single coyote heard in distance, lights fade softly into moonlight, the figures of the brothers now appear to be caught in a vast desert-like landscape” (59). Whatever the outcome of the struggle between Lee and Austin, it appears that the Old Man has won.
Shepard’s exploration of the writer’s attempt to negotiate his bifurcation between what he has come to define more and more clearly as the male and female principles – the cowboy and the lady, the Old Man and Mom, the desert of the West and domesticated culture – reaches its full development in Fool for Love. In 1993, Shepard told Carol Rosen that his work in the mid-eighties was influenced by feminism, to the extent that
there was a period of time when there was a kind of awareness happening about the female side of things. Not necessarily women but just the female force in nature becoming interesting to people. And it became more and more interesting to me because of how that female thing relates to being a man . . . as a man what is it like to embrace the female part of yourself that you historically damaged for one reason or another.18
The most obvious reference for this comment is to A Lie of the Mind (1985), but it is equally important to understanding Fool for Love. Shepard said in 1997 that “the play came out of falling in love. It’s such a dumb-founding experience. In one way you wouldn’t trade it for the world. In another way it’s absolute hell. More than anything, falling in love causes a certain female thing in a man to manifest.”19
Like True West, Fool for Love is at one level a monodrama about the writer’s bifurcation. In this case, the important split is between the aspects of his creativity that Shepard identifies as male and female forces. What is at stake is whether Eddie will succumb to the influence of the male principle, the Old Man, or the female principle, his lover/sister May, and by extension her mother and some version of the Eternal Feminine. Eddie is described by the Old Man as “A fantasist . . . You dream things up.”20 The primal relation of truth to stories, or lying, is raised in one of the play’s most memorable images, the empty picture frame that the Old Man tells Eddie is “somethin’ real . . . Somethin’ actual” (27), a picture of Barbara Mandrell. Since the Old Man is “actually married to Barbara Mandrell in [his] mind,” the picture, he tells Eddie, is “realism.” Because the Old Man considers his own subjective experience to be the only reality, it is easy for him to claim that his love for Eddie’s and May’s mothers was “the same love. Just got split in two, that’s all” (48). In his solipsistic view, his love remains unchanged even though he has deserted both of the women: “I wasn’t disconnected. There was nothing cut off in me. Everything went on just the same as though I’d never left” (55).
In realizing that he still loves May but feels compelled to pursue his new passion for the Countess, Eddie is confronting his “male” heritage from the Old Man: “He had two separate lives . . . two completely separate lives. He’d live with me and my mother for a while and then he’d disappear and go live with her and her mother for a while” (48). Eddie faces three alternatives: he can win May back and remain with her; he can leave her and continue his relationship with the Countess; or he can do what the Old Man did, and split himself in two by trying to fulfill his desire for both of them.
The second half of Fool for Love stages an agon in the form of a story-telling contest, with May’s suitor Martin standing in for the spectators as the judge of what is most believable, and therefore “real.” Eddie’s is a coming-of-age story in which he undergoes a kind of initiation into love by his father. He tells of his father’s disappearances and reappearances, and then the period when the Old Man says he was “making a decision” (49), taking long walks across the fields. In Eddie’s story, he asks if he can go with his father one night, and they walk off across the fields together, silent the whole time. The Old Man buys a bottle, and the two pass it back and forth wordlessly as they walk, finally reaching the “little white house with a red awning” where May and her mother live. As May’s mother and the Old Man fall into each other’s arms, May appears, “just standing there, staring at me and I’m staring back at her and we can’t take our eyes off each other. It was like we knew each other from somewhere but we couldn’t place where. But the second we saw each other, that very second, we knew we’d never stop being in love” (50).
Eddie’s is a “male” story of inarticulate father–son bonding and imitation – of the son becoming the father – and a dark romantic tale of succumbing wordlessly to illicit, passionate love as to a star-crossed destiny. May responds by telling Martin that “none of it’s true”: a “He’s had this weird, sick idea for years now and it’s totally made up. He’s nuts” (51). She says that Eddie’s told her the story a thousand times and “it always changes” (51). When Eddie retorts, “I never repeat myself,” May responds, “You do nothing but repeat yourself” (51). The spectator’s response to the story is signaled by Martin’s. When Eddie asks if he thinks he made the whole thing up, Martin replies, “No. I mean at the time you were telling it, it seemed real” (51). Eddie suggests that he is doubting it now because May said it was a lie: “She suggests it’s a lie to you and all of a sudden you change your mind? Is that it? You go from true to false like that, in a second?” (51). Of course he does, as the play’s audience has, and as it was set up by Shepard to do. One of the major issues the scene raises is the relation of reality, and of truth, to art. The reliability of the narrative is made even more questionable in the Robert Altman film of Fool for Love, in which Shepard played Eddie, and for which he wrote the screenplay. There the stories are told in voiceover as sequences of “the past” appear on screen. Many details of the action the spectators are watching contradict those in the story they are hearing.
The men’s responses are telling when May proposes to tell “the whole rest of the story . . . just exactly the way it happened. Without any little tricks added onto it” (52). “What does she know?” says the Old Man, and Eddie responds, “She’s lying” (52). May’s story is a classic tale of woman scorned. May’s mother is “obsessed with [the Old Man] to the point where she couldn’t stand being without him for even a second” (53). She follows him from town to town, until finally she “dogs him down.” She is “on fire” and her body is “trembling” as she searches the town for him, yet she is “terrified” because she knows she is “trespassing . . . crossing this forbidden zone but she couldn’t help herself” (53). As Eddie imitated his father, May imitated her mother, becoming obsessed with Eddie to the extent that she didn’t even feel sorry for her mother, who was again deserted by the Old Man, because “all [she] could think of was him” (54). The Old Man interrupts May’s story with pleas to Eddie: “Boy, is she ever off the wall with this one. You gotta’ do somethin’ about this . . . she’s gettin’ way outa line, here” (53–54). When May says that Eddie’s mother “blew her brains out” when she heard about May and Eddie, the Old Man makes a direct appeal to Eddie:
This story doesn’t hold water. (To Eddie, who stays seated) You’re not gonna’ let her off the hook with that one are ya’? That’s the dumbest version I ever heard in my whole life. She never blew her brains out. Nobody ever told me that. Where the hell did that come from? . . . Stand up! Get on yer feet now goddammit! I wanna’ hear the male side a’ this thing. You gotta’ represent me now. Speak on my behalf. There’s no one to speak for me now! Stand up! . . . We’ve got a pact. Don’t forget that.
(54)
This is an explicit challenge to Eddie to join in solidarity with the “male side,” eschewing the female point of view as his father has, and living completely within his own solipsistic reality. Eddie refuses the Old Man, affirming May’s story instead. As Eddie’s and May’s eyes meet, and they begin to draw together, the Old Man pleads with Eddie: “You two can’t come together! You gotta’ hold up my end a’ this deal. I got nobody now! Nobody! You can’t betray me! You gotta’ represent me now! You’re my son!” (55).
Although Eddie and May do come together momentarily, signifying their union with an embrace and kiss, this fusion of male and female is unstable in Sam Shepard’s world. Sexuality intrudes, in the form of the Countess, who sets off an explosion and a consuming fire. Eddie goes out to “take a look,” and May knows that “he’s gone” (56). After May leaves with her suitcase, it is the Old Man who has the last word, pointing to the empty picture frame, and saying “that’s the woman of my dreams. That’s who that is. And she’s mine. She’s all mine. Forever” (57). Which of course she is, since she exists completely within the Old Man’s consciousness anyway.
In the context of Shepard’s writing about the writer and his imagination, the import of this exploration of the male and female principles is not particularly hopeful. Although he consciously rejects the Old Man’s demand for blind affiliation with the “male side” of things, Eddie cannot escape his influence, and he seems destined to act out the story if not to endorse it. On the other hand, although it is not clear where May is going at the end of the play, unlike her mother she accepts the fact that her lover is “gone,” and moves on with her life. This is made even clearer in the film, as May walks determinedly out onto the road while Eddie chases after the Countess on horseback, ridiculously trying to lasso her Mercedes. Shepard would seem to recognize the need to see the “female side” of things as he recognizes the need to fight such assaults on the writer’s imagination as Hollywood’s attempt to commodify it and the attempts by middle-brow cultural forces to domesticate it. He also realizes that these are ongoing conflicts the artist must face, not issues that can be “solved” by writing plays about them. Speaking about the power of family influences, Shepard has said, “I think that there is no escape, that the wholehearted acceptance of it leads to another possibility. But the possibility of somehow miraculously making myself into a different person is a hoax, a futile game. And it leads to insanity, actually . . . People go insane trying to deny what they really are.”21
1 Sheila Rabillard, “Shepard’s Challenge to the Modernist Myths of Origin and Originality: Angel City and True West,” in Leonard Wilcox (ed.), Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays of Sam Shepard (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 77–96 and Leonard Wilcox, “West’s The Day of the Locust and Shepard’s Angel City,” Modern Drama, 36 (1993): 61–75.
2 Mona Simpson, Jeanne McCulloch, and Benjamin Howe, “Sam Shepard: the Art of Theatre XII,” The Paris Review, 142 (Spring 1997): 204–25.
3 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols., The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. I (Princeton University Press, 1983), 304.
4 Irene Oppenheim and Victor Fascio, “The Most Promising Playwright in American Today is Sam Shepard,” Village Voice, 27 October 1975, 81.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
8 Oppenheim and Fascio, “Most Promising Playwright,” 81.
9 Rabillard, “Shepard’s Challenge to the Modernist Myths.”
10 Carol Rosen, “Emotional Territory: an Interview with Sam Shepard,” Modern Drama, 36.1 (1993): 8.
11 Sam Shepard, Angel City in Fool for Love and Other Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 61–62. Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
12 Shepard, Geography of a Horse Dreamer in Fool for Love and Other Plays, 279. Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
13 Ross Wetzsteon, “Looking a Gift Horse Dreamer in the Mouth,” in Bonnie Marranca (ed.), American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981), 133–34.
14 Martin Tucker, Sam Shepard (New York: Continuum, 1992), 98.
15 Coe, “Saga of Sam Shepard,” 122.
16 William Kleb suggests that “Austin represents objectivity, self-control and self-discipline, form and order, the intellect, reason. Lee stands for subjectivity, anarchy, adventure, excess and exaggeration, intuition and imagination.” See William Kleb, “Worse than Being Homeless: True West and the Divided Self,” in Marranca, American Dreams, 121. Tucker Orbison has suggested that “Lee and Austin form dual opposed elements in a single self,” with Lee functioning as a Jungian “shadow figure” for Austin. See Tucker Orbison, “Mythic Levels in Sam Shepard’s True West,” Modern Drama, 27.4 (1984): 513, 515. See also, David Wyatt, “Shepard’s Split,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 91.2 (Spring 1992): 333–60.
17 Sam Shepard, True West in Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 13. Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
18 Rosen, “Emotional Territory,” 6–7.
19 Simpson et al., “Sam Shepard: the Art of Theatre XII,” 221.
20 Sam Shepard, Fool for Love in Fool for Love and Other Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 27. Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
21 Rosen, “Emotional Territory,” 9.